Excerpt: Entangled

I faced Brett.
“What the hell is this, Brett?”
He looked scared, like he’d just let an angry werewolf into his office and now had to deal with it, poop and all. Which wasn’t that far from the truth. I’d always been basically a slow burning fuse, liable to explode at any time. But ever since that day… ever since Luke had left, I had been particularly tempestuous.
“Look, Cassie, it’s really not what you think,” he said. I restrained from speaking aloud the many sardonic comments bubbling up into my brain. “You shouldn’t have stormed out like that. I haven’t given you the whole story yet.”
I shook my head slowly in disgust, outrage rising up in my chest. “What more could there be, Brett? I have every right to “storm out”!” I made little quotation marks with my fingers in the air. “I’m being framed for a crime that I didn’t commit! In Antarctica, no less!” I didn’t say the taboo words: Polar York.
“Cassie—”
“Shut up!” I was about to knock over a decorative, turn of the century vase resting on a table near the door, but then I realized that this was Brett’s office; Brett was the chief; he had every right to fire me. My hand shook as I withdrew it.
“Chief Brett, you know me,” I said in a slightly quieter and steadier tone. “I may have some… issues, but I’m not a murderer!” My voice rose in pitch at the end of the sentence. I wasn’t a murderer! This was impossible…
Brett looked directly at me. None of his previous insecurity and hesitation was and his usual briskness seemed to come back as he said: “Cassie, you are not a murderer. Nobody thinks you are a murderer.”
My head whipped around to the door. I knew that behind it, all of the occupants of this branch of the NYPD were staring at it, muttering under their breaths to their coworkers and partners:
“I wonder what’s going on in there—”
“Is she really a—”
“She’s so strange, I always knew that she’d—”
I slowly turned back to face Brett. “Then how do you explain them?” I asked, jerking my thumb back in the general direction of the main office.
“I told you, we had to tell them a different story than what we’re telling you!”
Another wave of tiredness hit me, along with a relapse of that same odd feeling of being separated that had been bugging me since I woke up. I suddenly had the urge to sit down, to lie down, to just go to sleep for a few days and have this whole debacle blow over.
“Cassie, sit down, you look exhausted.”
It was that obvious, huh. I obeyed his suggestion and slid into the chair I had been sitting in before.
He placed his hands, folded, on the desk in front of him. Some of that tiredness and inhibition seemed to return. “Ah… all right then. The files I show you do indeed posit you as the culprit behind the murder in Polar York…”
I scoffed.
“But what you must understand is that the person that is suspected to be behind this is not you. It’s… well, you.”
I was entirely and utterly confused. I showed this with a lift of my eyebrow.
“Your duplicate, Cassie.”
Oh.